Re: OT: Vocal Harmonizer recommendations?

["Jon Southwood" <jsouthwood@gmail.com>]

An excerpt from an on-line interview with her:

--begin clip

Hide and Seek is a fantastic track, but also a brave choice for
a single in a way, because it only features your voice fed through a
vocoder. Was that a brave move do you think?

Yep! It is quite brave isn't it! But I really didn't expect it to have
that effect. Actually that's not true- I knew that if people heard it,
because it's so unusual, and it's like a hymn, it's not any particular
genre, so the fact that Radio 1 has picked up on it is amazing, because
obviously more people can hear it. I think it started in a way because
Jo Whiley is a fan of the O.C., and so she played it, but then people
like Zane Lowe and Scott Mills, they never watch the O.C.

How many vocal layers are there in the track roughly?

Well there's actually only two real mes in there at any one point, and
then the rest of it is going through the vocoder. It was a real magical
mysterious evening when it came out of me. I'd had a bit of a nightmare
in the studio that day, and everything was playing up. I didn't want to
leave the studio without something to say for myself. Also because I
had people on the blog that I had to prove that I'd done something that
day! So I picked up the vocoder, which I hadn't really used much,
plugged it into the minidisc, just to record whatever came out. And
literally the whole song (apart from the lyrics), the exact melody, the
exact timing of the breathing and everything, the two melodies coming
in together at the end, all happened in the space of like ten minutes.
I really love the song for that reason as well. I didn't have to slave
over it. There are some songs that I find it difficult to listen to,
because I remember it took me however long to sort out that chord or
whatever, but Hide and Seek was like a dream come true.

---end clip

As Jeff mentioned, she doesn't identify the vocoder, but she leaves no doubt that it was a vocoder and not a harmonizer. The full interview can be found here:

http://www.pixelsurgeon.com/interviews/interview.php?id=200

Cheers,
Jon

On 7/11/07, Mark Sottilaro < sine@zerocrossing.net> wrote:

I'd bet money on the fact that Imogen Heap is using the latest version of this technology.  I saw her live and she sounded great.  I say, if you know what she's using, speak up.  That's the model to buy.  Also, I think she used combos of harmonizers and vocoders during different tracks.

 

Mark